Wayland (protocol)

Wayland is a communication protocol that specifies the communication between a display server and its clients, as well as a C library implementation of that protocol. A display server using the Wayland protocol is called a Wayland compositor, because it additionally performs the task of a compositing window manager.

Wayland is developed by a group of volunteers initially led by Kristian Høgsberg as a free and open-source community-driven project with the aim of replacing the X Window System with a secure and simpler windowing system for Linux and other Unix-like operating systems. The project's source code is published under the terms of the MIT License, a permissive free software license. The Wayland project also develops an implementation of a Wayland compositor called Weston.